Lifestyle Gurus. Chris Rojek
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to influence government policies. In Risk Society (1992), Beck cites government oversight during the Chernobyl and Bhopal disasters as noteworthy incidents that lowered public trust of politicians, science and technology. Scandals involving pharmaceutical companies buying the opinions of doctors and scientists to endorse particular drugs further erodes trust relations between professionals and the public (Goldacre 2012). In these circumstances, experts themselves are condemned as a risk and hazard to well-being (Beck 2006: 336). The result is growing public scepticism of professionals that undermines the legitimacy of the institutions they represent, often referred to as ‘Big Business’, ‘Big Food’ and ‘Big Pharma’. It manifests in general feelings of distrust towards experts and elites, providing a space for alternative religious and secular voices to claim authority in opposition to received fiat. This attitude was forcefully expressed during the 2016 United States presidential election and United Kingdom European Union membership referendum in 2016 when both the Republican candidate, Donald Trump and Michael Gove, the former British Justice Secretary, attacked the sanctity of expert knowledge and practice. Late modern life, then, is characterised by a distinct set of attitudes towards professional expertise. On the one hand, we rely more on experts to help ameliorate the complexities and uncertainties of modern life; on the other, distrust of authority and expertise is part of the scepticism that characterises ‘reflexive modernity’.
Lifestyle gurus have exploited and developed these contradictions. They have emerged, with little or no formal training, to afford authoritative help to enable people to navigate their life trajectories to avoid the rock of failure. It is not that authority and expertise has altogether eroded; deference to expertise has been replaced by deference to the celebrity lifestyle guru and social media influencer. The various life courses set by professional helmsmen, have been rivalled, and in some cases outflanked, by folk heroes. The current prominence of the latter appears to negate the Enlightenment conviction that the destiny of society was to be ruled by a new priesthood organised around Reason and Science (Comte 1998). Contrarily, they also suggest that the Enlightenment was right about one thing: the crisis of trust that characterises contemporary institutions (religious, political, media institutions and even social media with the rise of ‘fake news’). Trust is socially manufactured and easily broken. When we are disillusioned, we simply seek a new celebrity influencer or lifestyle guru to follow.
Traditionally, the word expert was assigned to a narrow range of professionals. The term was typically applied to describe a person who acquired knowledge or skills in a specific area through formal training and approved certification. These credentials were a sign of quality and achievement that distinguished trustworthy knowledge from lay experience. Qualifications took the form of an apprenticeship or tertiary education, such as a law or medical degree. Conversely, what constitutes expertise in lifestyle matters has historically been more liberal and unclear. To be a good cook, a thorough cleaner, or a competent parent, is increasingly valued as expertise, particularly following the mass entrance of women into the workforce, the outsourcing of many of these traditionally ‘feminine’ practices and the rise of the middle class. The shift from credentialled knowledge to lay knowledge has been conceived as part of the growing ‘informalisation’ of everyday life, where access to advice and expertise became relatively democratised and presented in increasingly accessible, digestible forms (Lewis 2008; Wouters 2007). Informalisation teaches that you are the master of your own destiny. However, because modern life is complex, and subject to change, every master needs an authoritative compass. Lifestyle gurus fulfil this role. They are ‘information providers’ who offer advice and guidance about how to manage oneself and navigate personal problems in everyday life (Hanusch 2013). The online ethos in which this is nurtured is one of non-hierarchical, alternative, co-operative labour. Most lifestyle gurus make a virtue of rejecting the ‘master–servant’ relationships of professional life as bad practice. Instead, in line with Enlightenment precedents, they cultivate an ethos of mutuality, informality, tolerance and openness. Getting the most out of yourself is typically presented as a ludic experience rather than a draft of medicine. The play form of self-motivation and self-construction allows life lessons to be learned in a non-hierarchical, enjoyable fashion. However, concomitant with this is the commodification of lifestyle, whereby ordinary life skills have become packaged and monetised (Fürsich 2012). True to their commercial roots, lifestyle gurus generally take it for granted that the best things in life do not come free. To be an optimal individual requires the cultivation and practice of positive ‘self-feeling’. The positive thinking strategies and methods of practice developed by online lifestyle gurus are commercially packaged to bring this within the reach of their subscribers.
The History of Lifestyle Gurus
Today lifestyle gurus are often thought of as an adjunct of social media. This is a mistake. The phenomenon of virtue signalling and using positive thinking to achieve self-fulfilment and make a meaningful contribution to society pre-dates digital technology. What is commonly regarded as the first self-help book in English, Self-help with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), was written by Samuel Smiles. The book was concerned with cultivating various human qualities in personal life and business and perseverance to the duty of ‘becoming a better person’. Smiles advised that people should learn from the Christian good example in history and society of people who would act as role models in the rational duty of self-improvement. In his later book, Character (1908), he comments on what readers of his own day could profitably learn from men and women of the past with respect to topics like ‘Companionship’, ‘Work’, ‘Courage’, ‘Self-Control’, ‘Duty’, ‘Truthfulness’ and ‘Temper’. These virtues are presented as lifestyle resources calculated to pay a dividend in – to borrow a phrase that he repeatedly returns to in the book – ‘the school life’. For Smiles, it is the will of God for each individual to work out the end of one’s being to the best of one’s power (Smiles 1908). However, charting a course without a proper life-compass to life runs the risk of shipping water. The principles of self-help are intended to be an exhaustive guide to the most effective methods for solving life’s problems and maximising one’s potential. It defines life, not merely as a passage, but as a project.
Smiles’ work was part of the industrialisation of self-help. This was a process that respected the wisdom of the past. The prime mover, however, was the principle that motivation comes from within, by rote learning and application of what can be rationally extracted from significant others in history, culture and society. Other influential writers were swept up in the same moment. For example, the American feminist and household management guru, Catharine Beecher’s influential book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), advised ‘women to perfect themselves as Christian wives and mothers, adhering to quite traditional New England values, so as to master the economic logic of modern time’ (Allen 2005: 68). Effective time management and the cult of perfectionism was the nucleus of her household management system. What she took from science and professional management in the marketplace was selectively mediated through the local folk values, imbricated with Christian teaching, with which she was raised. The regime of self-help that she advocated was class based and asserted fixed, rigid principles of perfection. For example, she regarded domestic virtue to lie in the punctually regulated standardisation of behaviour in the home. Family members were urged to rise together at the same hour, eat together at the same hour and take to their rest at the same hour. This was presented not only as the right choice for modern individual families but the best course for the future of society. In Beecher, the middle-class notion that self-improvement is the key to social progress is accentuated. Time management is expounded as a tool to master the economic and moral ambiguities of the market (Allen 2005: 74). It is worth noting that this is the inverse of the arguments made by subsequent generations of historians concerning the project of modern industrial development. For example, in a justly celebrated study, Edward Thompson (1967) maintained that the introduction of the mechanical clock into factories in England inscribed upon workers not only the notion of time–work discipline, but the logic of using time optimally that followed from the operation of the quantifiable price mechanism in the market. Thompson presented time management in the workplace as the foundation of order in the market place. Conversely, Beecher’s Treatise insists that it is in the home that the lessons of doing things at the proper time and in the